Negroes and the Gun

by Nicholas Johnson

  The extent of this practice is suggested by studies of southern convict labor schemes, which used the charge of carrying a concealed weapon and other minor offenses like vagrancy, using obscene language, and selling cotton after sunset, to funnel cash-poor black men into a system that leased them out to whoever paid their fines. The crime of carrying a concealed weapon, enforced primarily against Negroes, was, by the turn of the century, one of the most consistent methods of dragooning blacks into the system.22

  So it was not unusual that Robert Charles and his friend Leonard Pierce tucked .38 caliber Colt revolvers into their belts and headed out into the sticky July evening. At around 11:00 p.m., Charles and Pierce were sitting on the stoop of a row house, awaiting the return of Charles’s sister and her roommate, when two white New Orleans policemen approached. The progression from “What’s your business here?” to violence was quick.

  As Charles attempted to stand, one of the cops grabbed him. Charles pulled back, and the cop drew his club and then his revolver. Charles drew his own gun and they both fired, each taking nonfatal bullet wounds. Charles took off, leaving Leonard Pierce behind. Pierce identified Charles and told police where to find him.

  Slowed by his wound, Charles eventually made it back to his rented room, where he retrieved his Winchester rifle. The New Orleans police were not far behind. A squad of them approached and yelled for him surrender. Charles flung open the door and killed the captain with a bullet to the heart. Then he fired on two others, killing one of them with a shot through the eye. Two more in the rear retreated to an adjacent apartment. Charles stalked them briefly and then fled.23

  The flight of Robert Charles precipitated more than a police manhunt. It provoked a mob that ranged through the city, attacking targets of opportunity. It then descended on the parish prison, aiming to lynch Leonard Pierce. The prison was well defended, and there were no jailers willing to hand over Pierce, so the mob went back to random attacks. By morning, mobbers had killed three blacks and beaten approximately fifty others.

  The next day, police investigated a tip that Charles was hiding out in the home of friends on Saratoga Street. Charles had been there for hours, casting bullets and loading cartridges. As two officers entered the building, Charles shot them both with a barrage from his Winchester.24

  In the street, the crowd that had followed the cops was growing by the minute. By the early evening, one thousand armed men surrounded the building. Soon there would be more than ten thousand. People ducked for cover when Charles popped up from a second-story window and opened fire, killing one man in the crowd. Thoroughly surrounded, Charles surely appreciated that this was where he would die.

  The details of the gun battle seem embellished over time, with reports of five thousand shots fired into the second story where Charles huddled. If the reports are to be believed, Charles’s marksmanship and his capacity to avoid return fire were uncanny. Under a deluge of gunfire, Charles got off another fifty shots, killing two men in the crowd before finally succumbing to multiple wounds. Charles was dead, but the unsated mob spread through the city, killing three more Negroes and burning a black school.

  The incident is partly an affirmation of the danger of spillover and escalation from one incident into a cycle of violence and retribution. But it also raises the question, what motivated Robert Charles? Some contend that Charles was smoldering over the grotesque lynching of Sam Hose in Newman, Georgia, and focused his ire on the state government, which had recently stripped the vote from blacks. When his first victim, the New Orleans flatfoot, drew his club and pistol, Charles was already primed for war. Other reports said that Robert Charles was driven mad by cocaine. Republicans and Democrats said the episode demonstrated the worst ramifications of the opposing party’s policies. The Democratic press painted Charles as a prime example of a dangerous breed, the “bad nigger.”25

  For all the carnage he wrought, Robert Charles received remarkably sympathetic treatment from Ida B. Wells. But her assessment ranged far beyond the immediate conflict. For Wells, the incident was part of a broader current that included the lynching of Sam Hose, who had killed his employer in self-defense, and a dozen other lynchings that she had covered in the previous few months. The root problem, Wells said, was the cops’ “assurance born of long experience in the New Orleans service . . . that they could do anything to a Negro that they wished,” even though Charles and Pierce “had not broken the peace in any way whatever, no warrant was in the policeman’s hands to justify arresting them and no crime had been committed of which they were suspects.”

  Just as she did in the attacks on lynching, Wells turned white press reports to her advantage. The Times Democrat revealed the reason Charles and Pierce were confronted in the first place. The neighborhood had been “troubled with bad Negroes” and the neighbors were complaining to the Sixth Precinct police about them. Charles and Pierce had been sitting on a doorstep long enough that someone considered them suspicious, and police came to run them off.

  Some would say that the greatest hazard was the black men carrying guns in the first place, that Charles was no hero but was simply foolish. But Wells’s depiction of Charles’s last stand sounds like a Texan describing the heroes of the Alamo:

  Betrayed into the hands of the police, Charles, who had already sent two of his would-be murderers to their death, made a last stand in a small building, 1210 Saratoga St., and still defying his pursuers, fought a mob of 20,000 people single-handed and alone, killing three more men, mortally wounding two more and seriously wounding nine others. Unable to get him in his stronghold, the besiegers set fire to his house of refuge. While the building was burning Charles was shooting, and every crack of his death-dealing rifle added another victim to the price which he had placed upon his own life. Finally when fire and smoke became too much for flesh and blood to stand, the long sought for fugitive appeared in the door, rifle in hand, to charge the countless guns that were drawn upon him. With a courage which was indescribable, he raised his gun to fire again, but this time it failed, for 100 shots riddled his body, and he fell dead face front to the mob.26

  The Robert Charles shooting is a dramatic episode within a broad practice of arms that included plenty of prosaic beneficial gun use as well as ordinary crime and stupidity. Textured renditions of those more pedestrian episodes are rare. But there is a good example in the account of young Louis Armstrong, who reveals a pivotal episode of stupidity with a gun within a subculture that seemed to have plenty of it.

  Armstrong’s autobiography suggests that firearms were common among the denizens of black New Orleans at the turn of the century. Before he became the world-renowned horn player, Armstrong waded through the streets and dives of New Orleans and actually was set on his way to fame and fortune by a foolish act with a gun.

  As a teenager, Armstrong, armed with a pistol, dived into a stupid contest of bravado that leaves one thinking sympathetically about modern stop-and frisk programs. Armstrong and his fledging musical troupe were roaming the streets, singing for money. According to Armstrong, it was common to celebrate the holidays by “shooting off guns and pistols or anything loud so as to make as much noise as possible.” So when he ventured out New Year’s Day, he took the .38 caliber revolver that his mother kept in a cedar chest. It was a common gun, the same type that Robert Charles had carried.

  On Rampart Street, Armstrong’s little group passed by a kid who had made similar preparations. Armstrong was laughing and singing when “all of a sudden a guy on the opposite side of the street pulled out a little old six-shooter pistol and fired it off.” Armstrong’s friends goaded him, “Go get him, Dipper.” Armstrong pulled his gun “and let her go.” Armstrong’s gun was evidently a larger caliber. The noise and smoke frightened the other kid away, and Armstrong proceeded down Rampart Street, triumphant. He reloaded and started to shoot into the air again, when “a couple of strong arms came from behind” and dragged him off to jail.27

  Armstrong’s recklessness earned him a s
tay in the Colored Waifs Home, where he picked up a cornet from a little shelf of cast-off instruments. Armstrong’s story ended well. Many Negroes who reached for a gun were not nearly so lucky. And it demonstrates the power of the self-defense impulse that a robust black tradition of arms developed in spite of the unpredictable and often-tragic results of owning and using guns.

  Ida Wells surely wrestled with the worry that violence is an unpredictable catalyst.28 Although we have sparse good data on black gun crime at the turn of the century, we know that by 1920 the black homicide rate in many southern cities exceeded the exceptional murder rates of today’s black underclass. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this tracks earlier trends. Wells surely was aware of the ordinary interracial violence and common stupidity with guns illustrated by Louis Armstrong’s boyhood recklessness. Still, she erred toward folk having the option of armed self-defense, and that judgment was shared by prominent blacks of the day.

  Having already lost so much politically, and pushed further by the horror of lynch law, blacks at the end of the nineteenth century were operating in perhaps the most desperate time of their American experience. And lest anyone think that things could get no worse, the United States Supreme Court would soon invite further indignities in The Civil Rights Cases, concluding that neither the Thirteenth nor the Fourteenth Amendment were sufficient authority to sustain the public accommodations sections of the Civil Rights Act. This gave a green light to the full array of Jim Crow Laws and demonstrated for many the need for a national civil-rights organization to defend black interests. It also underscored the importance of self-help on a number of measures, including personal security.29

  No one was more animated on this point than the man who sheltered Ida Wells after she burned her bridges in Memphis, fiery editor of the New York Age, T. Thomas Fortune. Fortune was born a slave in Florida, in 1856. He came of age during Reconstruction and witnessed its promise and disappointment as his father Emanuel rose and fell in the tide of postwar politics. Like many blacks who staked their hopes on Reconstruction, Emanuel Fortune confronted white opposition united in its disdain for black rule—Whigs, Democrats, the landed rich, the rural poor, and the merchant class put aside their differences and coalesced around their common whiteness. Their opposition to Reconstruction was not just political but violent.30

  A delegate to the 1868 Florida constitutional convention, Emanuel Fortune was a rising star among black Republicans. And that made him and his political friends targets of violence. Just after nightfall in 1869, one of Fortune’s cohorts, Freedman’s Bureau agent W. J. Purman, was shot from the shadows while walking across the town square. Purman limped to safety and managed to survive. In the days that followed, a group of armed black men paid him a discreet visit and pledged to sack the village if Purman gave the word. It is not clear if Emanuel Fortune was part of this group. But it is clear that Fortune was armed and prepared to fight.

  Even before the shooting of W. J. Purman, Emanuel Fortune was wary of the mounting threats. Fearing ambush, he stopped traveling after nightfall, developed an enviable skill with a rifle, and made detailed preparations for any attack on his home. At the first hint of trouble, the children were to run upstairs. His wife, Sarah Jane, would then open the door and shield herself behind it. Emanuel, from the cover of a barricade he built in the center of the room, would open fire with his rifle.31

  One longs for more on the effect that this planning had on young Timothy as he passed by the barricade every day, and played on and around the bulking reminder that any random night might bring a gunfight. So far as we can tell, Emanuel Fortune’s defensive plan was uncashed insurance, but the fighting spirit it reflected burned hot in his son Timothy.

  Soon after the election of 1876 closed the door on Reconstruction, Timothy Thomas Fortune moved to New York, where he would eventually establish a newspaper that became the New York Age and later simply The Age. Fortune proved to be a kindred spirit for Ida Wells, at least for a time. He surrendered nothing to her in his militancy, and he endorsed armed self-defense just as fervently, although perhaps less colorfully.

  T. Thomas Fortune and Ida Wells were part of a new generation of activists in the freedom struggle. Some of them started newspapers—men like Harry C. Smith, who established the Cleveland Gazette, and W. Calvin Chase, who started the Washington Bee. Others, like New York lawyer T. McCants Stewart, made their mark in the professions or in business. Richard T. Greener, the first black graduate of Harvard, characterized this new generation as “Young Africa, stronger in the pocket and mildly contemptuous of the lofty airs of the old decayed colored aristocracy.” These men and women channeled the voice of the “New Negro,” a rising class of black agitators who, Fortune asserted, were “the death knell of the shuffling, cringing creature in black who for two centuries and a half had given the right-of-way to white men.”32

  Fortune was an articulate but volatile affiant of the black tradition of arms. Although he proposed to respect the line between political violence and self-defense, his passion fueled a rhetorical style that sometimes treaded close to the boundary. Describing the agenda and strategy of his proposed national civil-rights organization, the Afro-American League, Fortune exhorted, “we propose to accomplish our purposes by the peaceful methods and agitation through the ballot and the courts. But if others use the weapons of violence to combat our peaceful arguments, it is not for us to run away from violence. . . . Attucks, the black patriot—he was no coward! . . . Nat Turner—he was no coward! . . . If we have work to do, let us do it. And if there comes violence, let those who oppose our just cause ‘throw the first stone.’”33 Looking out desperately toward the new century, Fortune declared, “to be murdered by mobs is not to be endured without protest, and if violence must be met with violence, let it be met. If the white scamps lynch and shoot you, you have the right to do the same.”34

  Some criticized him for agitating from the relative comfort and safety of New York City, but Fortune had endured his share of racism and did not shy from a fight. In fact, he seems consciously to have picked one in 1890 when he entered the bar at the Trainor Hotel on Thirty-Third Street and demanded a glass of beer. He was refused service, as he apparently expected. In the record from a subsequent trial, the bar owner claimed that Fortune threatened to “mop up the floor with anyone who laid hands on him.”

  Fortune gave a different account of the conflict. He sued the bar owner for assault, solicited donations for a litigation fund, and ultimately won a thousand-dollar jury verdict. The black press celebrated Fortune’s victory. He was the model of the New Negro, said the Indianapolis Freeman, adding that in the past “the Negro’s greatest fault was being a magnificent sufferer.”35

  The allegation that Fortune had threatened to mop up the floor with anyone who laid hands on him is consistent with his editorial stance. Denouncing a Georgia court decision allowing railroad conductors to send black first-class passengers back to the smoking car, Fortune advised Negroes to “knock down any fellow who attempts to enforce such a robbery.”

  Cognizant that he was advising Negroes to strike the first blow, Fortune equivocated, “we do not counsel violence; we counsel manly retaliation.” Then, capturing the dilemma that state failure and malevolence posed for blacks, he reasoned, “in the absence of law . . . we maintain that the individual has every right in law and equity to use every means in his power to protect himself.”

  Fortune’s militant stance extended explicitly to the use of firearms. Commenting on an interracial gunfight in Virginia, Fortune wrote, “if white men are determined upon shooting whenever they have a difference with a colored man, let the colored man be prepared to shoot also. . . . If it is necessary for colored men to arm themselves and become outlaws to assert their manhood and their citizenship, let them do it.”36

  This editorial drew a harsh response from the white press. One paper argued that Fortune’s advice would provoke a race war that blacks could not win. Fortune responded with an essay titled “T
he Stand and Be Shot or Shoot and Stand Policy”: “We have no disposition to fan the coals of race discord,” Thomas explained, “but when colored men are assailed they have a perfect right to stand their ground. If they run away like cowards they will be regarded as inferior and worthy to be shot; but if they stand their ground manfully, and do their own a share of the shooting they will be respected and by doing so they will lessen the propensity of white roughs to incite to riot.” On the last passionate turn, Fortune argued that a man who would not defend himself was properly deemed “a coward worthy only of the contempt of brave men.”

  Fortune’s prescription here teases back and forth into the boundary-land between political violence and individual self-defense. The editor of the Cincinnati Afro-American saw Fortune’s approach as utter folly and welcomed inclusion on “the list of cowards,” arguing that it was indeed “better for the colored man to stand and be shot than to shoot and stand.” This dissent provokes the question whether Fortune was on the edge of community sentiment or in the middle of it.

  One signal of how Fortune’s views resonated in the community is the long-standing but largely secretive connection between him and the conservative Booker T. Washington. In a decades-long relationship, Fortune was sometimes a daily correspondent with Washington and often served as ghostwriter for Washington’s books, speeches, and editorials. Washington secretly financed Fortune’s journalistic efforts, and when the New York Age was incorporated, Washington took a block of stock in exchange for his past and future support of the paper.

  Fortune was a passionate race man and sometimes, especially in extemporaneous speeches, he projected a militant tone that the Wizard of Tuskegee surely deemed unwise. This was certainly the case in 1898 when an irate Fortune unleashed a tirade against President William McKinley’s tour of reconciliation through the South. Incensed that McKinley was honoring Confederate dead while blacks were being lynched in the name of white supremacy, Fortune ranted, “I want the man whom I fought for to fight for me, and if he don’t I feel like stabbing him.”37